Richard W.M. Jones: virt-rescue fixes

Although libguestfs gives you a nice structured library and tools for manipulating disk images, sometimes you just want to run a few Linux commands like mke2fs and fdisk against a disk image. For those times there is another tool called virt-rescue. It gives you a “rescue shell” connected to the disk image, and the usual set of command line Linux tools:

Virt-rescue was a bit clumsy to use before because it didn’t (for example) pass Ctrl-C through to the rescue shell, so using that or other control keys would kill, stop or do other drastic things to the whole program.

I spent a bit of time last week fixing all of this, to make a really great, usable rescue shell.

The first thing is that ^C now works right:

><rescue> cat > /tmp/foo^C
><rescue>

The second most requested feature is support for automatically mounting up the guest’s filesystems (rather than having to tediously type mount commands at the shell prompt). As with guestfish, the -i option now does the right thing: